Windows Torment - Locked Out from my Files

Long story short, about everything on my main machine went and toasted itself quite recently. Everything save my primary HDD, as it was out of the machine at the time. That made things a little easier, no computer is really bad, but my files are still there - I had everything on that HDD, and it was all intact. Gigabytes of scanned art and photographs, a large number of which are the only existing copy..at least for the photographs, there isn't a backup or duplicate anywhere else, as they are very recent and can't be redone or reshot.

Anyway, brought over the HDD to elsewhere, booted it as slave, and behold, my drive! Soon to be discovered is a wall that's killing me, and I really would appreciate if someone can help me out. On my rig, I had one administrator account, and a password. All my folders were protected and couldn't be opened from any other account, which was the guest account. I fear that's still so:

" E:\Documents and Settings\Nick is not accessible.

Access is denied. "

Now the sensible thing seems to do is connect it as primary drive, boot, log in, and dig my stuff out from there. However, there have been far too many hardware changes or whatnot, and it refuses to boot at alll, safe mode or not. It won't even get that far.